2004 NBA playoffs
basketball competition
The 2004 NBA playoffs was the postseason tournament of the National Basketball Association's 2003–04 season. The tournament concluded with the Eastern Conference champion Detroit Pistons defeating the Western Conference champion Los Angeles Lakers four games to one in the NBA Finals. Chauncey Billups was named NBA Finals MVP.
Overview
The 2004 playoffs was the first appearance for the Memphis Grizzlies in their nine-year history which began in Vancouver. However, they failed to win a single game in their first three playoff appearances (2004, 2005, 2006) before earning their first playoff game and series victories in 2011.
The Minnesota Timberwolves, entered their eighth consecutive post season.
The Denver Nuggets made the playoffs for the first time since 1995.
The New Orleans Hornets made their final postseason appearance as a member of the East. They would not make the playoffs again until 2008, as a member of the West (the result of a realignment with the addition of the Charlotte Bobcats in the 2004–05 NBA season). Their playoff series with the Miami Heat, led by Dwyane Wade, was the last playoff series where the home team won all seven games until 2008's Boston–Atlanta and Boston–Cleveland playoff series.
The Houston Rockets made playoffs for the first time since 1999.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2603423. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2003, 2005 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “2004 NBA playoffs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.